The Startup Journey

Alok Kejriwal has a colorful post exhorting entrepreneurs to have the courage to say ‘Jump’ to anything/anyone that that puts them in a corner in their entrepreneurial journey. Employees, Colleagues, Clients and Co-Partners. All of them have individual aspirations. They partner with you since their vision and yours is the same. However, things change and that’s when you have to be unyielding in your conviction as well as in your beliefs. In each appraisal cycle, we face challenges, when our co-workers expect larger than affordable salaries. You have to have the courage to take the risk of losing them rather than ruining your business. Most of the times when you recommend your colleagues to quit and move on, they stay back. Clients always test the limit to which you will bend, negotiate and yield and will pretend to not be interested in your proposal. But when when you really walk away, trust me, they will come back running. Arun Natarajan is the Founder & CEO of Venture Intelligen...

Vikram of Tenmiles has a nice post on the topic. Extracts (emphasis mine): 6. Do your best to stay within the window of opportunity From the time a customer expresses his/her interest in your product (either via the web or by signing up for a free trial), you can rest assured of swinging a deal in your favor IF you’re able to make a convincing pitch within the critical window of opportunity. By visiting your website and signing up for a trial, your customer has clearly indicated he/she is interested in your product. The next and crucial step is to sustain the customer’s interest level, before it begins to waiver. This typically happens when customer’s are evaluating multiple products or are just unable to see how your product responds to their needs. The difficult part here is establishing how long the window of opportunity is open for, so do your best to seal the customer’s interest right from the beginning. ...8. Always remember to follow through Responses to expressions of interes...

First published in Financial Express. Reproduced with the author's permission. Some time ago, I met with a young entrepreneurial team that had started an e-commerce company. They seemed very excited and gung-ho with the prospects of their company. But there didn’t seem to be any differentiation in their product offering vis-à-vis the many others who too, according to me, were dispensing similar, if not, identical e-commerce services. I therefore asked about their differentiation. I was told that they had not just an online service but also a physical, telephone enabled and mobile versions of their service. The conversation reminded me of my days as a computer salesman in the mid 1980s. In those early days, vendors and customers were both equally knowledgeable or ignorant (depending on how you look at it!) and the IT revolution was yet to take off. Personal computer sales would take place based on features – kind of monitor, size of the monitor, kind of keyboard, number of keys on...